She stopped walking then, ending up a step behind Allanbridge and to his left, as though she were his bodyguard or a foreman’s clerk.

The people of the Hitch that had assembled to receive them numbered perhaps a score. At least half were Grasshopper-kinden, tall and lean and sallow, with hollow cheeks and high foreheads and bare feet. There were a half-dozen Dragonflies as well, looking just as impoverished. They were as golden-skinned and slender as Salma had been, but if these were fallen nobility, they had fallen very far indeed. There was a Roach-kinden couple, white-haired and stooped, and looming over them all was a single gigantic Mole Cricket woman.

Tynisa had encountered a couple of that giant kinden since the war, both of them Imperial deserters and both of them male. They had been half again as tall as a tall man, enormously broad at the shoulder, massive of arm, with skin like obsidian, and in manner quiet and wary, although that might simply have been the escaped slave in them. This apparition before her was something again. The woman stood surely a foot taller than those two men she remembered, and her body fell in enormous curves – of shoulders, breasts, belly and thighs – so that beneath her brown woollen robe she looked like a melting idol shaped from mud. She had a riotous flow of silver hair and her face, many-chinned and broad, was beaming at Allanbridge with rapacious cheer.

‘Why, it’s my favourite Lowlander!’ she boomed, loud enough that Tynisa feared for the solidity of the cliffs above them.

‘Ma Leyd,’ Allanbridge named her, making a brief bow. ‘Always a pleasure.’

‘This man’s a friend,’ Ma Leyd assured her followers, who were clustered about her colossal waist like children.

‘He’s the one with the trade boat?’ one of the Grasshoppers piped up.

‘You see it there,’ Ma Leyd replied cheerily, pointing out the Windlass with a finger not much smaller than Tynisa’s wrist. ‘You’re on your way up to Siriell’s Town, Master Allanbridge?’